Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Dino Hoodie Rex

I’ve seen a bunch of cute tutorials on making these adorable dino-hoodies.I wasn’t able to find one that didn’t use felt or that didn’t cover the raw edges of the fabric.So I sort of made this up as I went along.Luckily, it turned out great.

I had purchased a plain grey hoodie for Baby Boy and wanted to dress it up, being that I was already inspired.My first “issue” I had to work out was the raw edges of my fabric. I used a cotton quilting fabric that I had in my scrap bin.I didn’t want to take the time to stitch the triangles, wrong-sides together and turn, then somehow figure out how to attach it to the hoodie, still hiding the raw edges, so I decided to use a quilt edging technique and made triangles from squares.This also created stiff triangles that didn’t need interfacing to stand up.

I measured the length of the hoodie from the front of the hood down to the bottom of the jacket for the “scales”.I used 4-inch squares and made twice as many as I would need (32/4=8).In hind-sight, I would have made a few more squares so that I could overlap the triangles.For the teeth, I measured the front of the hood (24”) and cut 12 - 2” squares from white cotton scrap fabric. To make the triangles, fold the square in half (wrong-sides together) on the diagonal as shown below:

Then fold it in half again to make the triangle shape:

Do this for all the squares and you will have scales and teeth with only one raw edge to deal with.

I stitched a line of triangles, raw edges to the center, along the center line of the hoodie from the top/front of the hood to the bottom of the hoodie. I placed the triangles right next to one another, but I would recommend overlapping them at least by the seam allowance.By doing so, you won’t have to deal with the tiny raw-edge corners in each of the “valleys” between the triangles.Lesson learned for next time.

Then I stitched another row of triangles along the first, being sure to match them up as much as possible.

To finish the scales, I folded the triangles together and stitched them together along the edges.

On to the teeth!My solution to hide the raw edges on the teeth was to use a double fold bias tape.I stitched the raw edges into the fold of the bias tape.